wandering the sheltering sky

I know it’s been a long time since i wrote. I’ve thought about it but there really hasn’t been much that was so remarkable that i thought it was worth sharing. There’s also the fact that i have this pile of shit from years ago that i promised i’d eventually post. For years it was something that absolutely consumed me. It cost me my job, my sanity and i couldn’t think of anything else during that time. Eight years on, i am repulsed by anything that reminds me of my past and the people i once associated with.

But i am going to push that plate of shit to the side for now because something came up last Monday that has brought me back here to write for the first time in what… two years?

A few weeks ago I started talking to a woman in Vancouver. She was pleasant, funny, attractive and seemed smart. For the first time in years, i felt like i had a spark with someone and even though she wasn’t a perfect fit for me, i’m at a point in my life where i need to find the things that i can bend on while keeping firm on those things that i can’t.

Last Saturday night we video chatted via Google Hangouts. It went well. She was cuter than her pictures led me to believe and we had a nice conversation.

On a whim, we ended up talking again the next night. I’d been out for a walk and had on my shorts so before we began, i wrapped a small comforter around my waist the same way you’d wrap a towel around yourself. My window in this room was open and because of where i live, the temps were 10c / 50f or so. The fabric of this blanket is kind of slick. I’m wearing it again right now and as usual, it’s come undone and my legs are cold ’cause i’m too stupid to close the window next to me.

What can i say? I like the feel of clear, clean air, even if it makes me cold.

I woke up on Monday to an email from her. It was titled, ‘Hi’ and read as follows:

Hi Shelly,

So it seemed to me that last night while we were chatting that you were masturbating. That’s not cool with me.

I wish you all the best.

Take care,
D

I stared at this message in utter disbelief. Was it a joke? Where was the punchline? What in the ever living fuck did this mean?

I immediately responded:

Oh my goodness. No. Absolutely not. What in the world gave you that idea?

I waited. Nothing from her. Then i started thinking. ‘Why would she say such a thing? What gave her this idea?’

Remember how i said this comforter that i have wrapped around me has a slick fabric? I kept pulling it back over my legs and generally fidgeting with it.

I wrote her again with:

This is deeply disconcerting, Denise. I’m actually shocked at the allegation but maybe others have done that sort of thing to you before.

I’d like to think i’m a pretty honest person. Whether you think that about me or not is up to you but no, my clothes were on. I was not masturbating. If you saw my hands moving down there, it was because the throw blanket that i had wrapped around my legs kept falling off.

I’ll leave it to you to decide if you think i’m deceptive in that or not but i’ve been very straight forward with you from the start.

She never responded. To this day, nearly a week later, she never responded.

It really, really hurt. I even cried that day and the rest of the week, i just felt more sadness than i’ve felt in a long time.

Tonight i finally put my thoughts into words and sent this following mail to her:

Dear D,

I do not know why you chose to accuse me of masturbating while we were talking last week. I can’t prove that I wasn’t but I wasn’t. I am a lot of things but what I’m not is a creep looking for cheap thrills, nor am I someone that would derive pleasure while denying consent from someone else.

I can’t prove to you that what you saw me do was fidgeting with my blanket. Had you asked me or said something during our talk, I could have shown you. It was chilly that night. I had an open window next to me and was wearing shorts. I have a small blanket made of a slick material. I had wrapped it around my waist like a towel. It kept sliding off and I kept pulling it back over my legs.

But I can look myself in the mirror and know I was honest in everything I ever told and shared with you. I am firmly of the belief that all honesty is derived from self honesty and along with that honesty comes a sense of dignity and respect for others. I did not take your accusation well. As far as personal events go, you filled me with more sorrow than any other event this year.

I forwarded your email and spoke to my friends and my family about your accusation and they’ve come to the same conclusion that I did- that you chose to see what you wanted to see. Further, the fact that you made your accusation without giving me a chance to respond revealed more than enough about you and the content of your character; specifically the lack thereof.

All you had to do was ask me what I was doing with my hands that night. I could have moved the camera to show you. You would have groaned then laughed and I could have teased you about it. That’s all you had to do- but you chose not to. Then you chose to accuse me without giving me a chance to respond.

I really enjoyed talking to you for that short time, Denise. You were the first spark I’ve felt for anyone in many years. You’re smart, cute, funny, conversational and I liked hearing about your day. It would have been nice to see how far anything between us could have gone- but you single handedly ruined that. While my conscious is clear, yours is troubled.

I wish you had said something that night but more than that, I just wish you were a better person than you are.

-Shelly

Sometimes you see what you choose to see.

Winter finally passed.

It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as it was in the years past. This was a relatively warm one with little snow or ice and the rains seemed to taper off earlier than usual. As I write this, we had our first significant rains in a month or more. The junipers outside my window are half bathed in the orange light of a sun nearly resting on the horizon, a cool breeze is floating into my room and i’m listening to Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians. This piece… i don’t think i’ve listened to it since the last time i wrote in my journal. I cannot express the absolute beauty, the sheer ecstasy of it.

I renewed my Discover Pass a few days ago. I went back to Rockport State Park. It wasn’t nearly as splendid as it was my first time- not because this was my 2nd trip but because with the lack of rain and the time of year, there weren’t nearly as many fungi and mushrooms about.

My next trip is going to be to Mt. Sauk.

I don’t know that i really have a purpose to write tonight. I think i just wanted to say hello and maybe in a moment of quiet reflection, remind myself just how much beauty there is in this world when I take the time to see it.

I’m out of time again. I’ll finish this another evening.

I’m not sure where this post is going to go. I suspect it’s one that i’ll come back to at some point and modify or perhaps eventually forget.

I had a dream two nights ago. It involved perhaps the three most important girlfriends that i’ve had in my life- Betina, Michelle and Heather (now known as Auburn). Actually Auburn is a bit of an outlier but important nonetheless.

I don’t have dreams like this often and when i do, they’re never good. I don’t remember much of this dream but it struck me as odd that these three were in it. It wasn’t a good dream nor was it as bad as they usually are.

I’m rambling.

It’s twenty years later. It’s twenty years since the woman i thought i would spend my life with came home to tell me she no longer loved me. In my profound ignorance and frankly, my arrogance, i thought it was a passing phase. I simply could not conceive of a life without her and for her part, she could not conceive of a life with me.

I was such a different person then and for more reasons than i care to acknowledge. I don’t have to live in shame but i certainly feel ashamed at some of the things i said and did.  Some of it was due to unresolved issues from my childhood, having been deprived of years of normalcy as a teenager (i was sent to boarding school that was run by both religious and behavior modification rules) and i was years into the obstructive sleep apnea.

Talking about OSA is one of the few things that i’m a bit evangelical about. I know i’ve said it so many times but it’s worth repeating. I should be dead. I should have died violently in my sleep many years ago. Snoring is one thing but when someone stops breathing for extended periods of time (my breathing would cease for up to 2 minutes at a time), it stops being ‘just snoring’ and becomes a serious health risk.

It’s twenty years later. The wound never closed but i can talk about it. I can talk about what my failings were. I can talk about what her failings were without being cruel or malicious. For years, she would tell me she loved me and considered us to be married (yes, it scared the hell out of me but i did love her so). Then one night she comes home to tell me she no longer loved me. When i asked her why she never said there were problems, she said she didn’t have any obligation to.

Why does this event have such deep scars in me? That’s easy. She was very culturally literate, she was hurt and innocent at the same time (something we had in common), She was amazingly beautiful and she was the closest i’d ever been to anyone. But those aren’t the reasons why two decades on, part of me still feels that loss.

It’s because Michelle was the only woman i took off all of my armor for.

In the aftermath of that loss, i found it did two things to me. It set an expectation of what i looked for in other women and it set an expectation of what i’d never tolerate again. There are several reasons why i’ve never married (i don’t make enough money to attract a mate, i don’t have any desire to reproduce nor will i become involved with someone with children, etc…) but i’d be lying if i said those two expectations haven’t played a part in it.

There’s also this: what happened to me afterward? Could they have happened had we managed to stay together?

Would i have fallen in love with house music? Would i have gotten over my fear and  learned to dance with absolute fucking abandon ? Would i have had lived, having never learned to appreciate drum and bass, jungle, techno (Detroit, minimalist)? I know that i made some amazing friends in the time i spent in Austin before I left it- Mikey, Chris, Eliza, Jeff, Ernesto and others. I would have never known them had i stayed with her and my life would have been diminished because of it.

Would i have ever moved to Portland and known Dave, Amy, Scott or Alicia? No.

On the other hand, i wouldn’t have lived in Seattle for a year. Oh boy. I really wish i could wind the clock back on that one. I really hated Seattle. Strangely, one day on the bus as i was going home, there was a woman that sat across from me that looked like it might have been Michelle. All i had to do was ask her but i didn’t. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps because if it was her, i would have owed her more apologies that i would have time to say- and certainly i did and maybe i still do. Not just the hubris of a misspent youth but being wholly accountable for my failures and explaining what it was like getting less than two hours of REM sleep every night for years on end and what that did to me intellectually and emotionally.

I’ll always live with the spectre (sp?) of the years i lost due to apnea and the swath of destruction it left in me and the wake of others around me in that time.

But would i have eventually found myself here had i stayed with her? I doubt it. I mean, it’s possible but I doubt it.

The sun is rising earlier every morning. A salmon colored horizon behind the shadow of Mt. Baker. Icy winds that bite my skin and smell of brightness and life itself. Countless mosses that hide in the texture of roads, turning them into sheets of burning emerald when the sun is out.

To be continued…

There was a time when i wanted to write nearly all the time. That changed when i began to be treated for my sleep apnea. For those that don’t know, i lost about 20 years of my life in a fugue state and by all rights, should have died in my sleep many times due to obstructive sleep apnea.

Then when going through a breakup a few years ago, all i could do was write- but the further I was from that experience, my desire to write diminished as well. And then I didn’t want to write at all because there is this huge backlog of thoughts, realizations, rage and pain that came out of that breakup here. They’re not just in the posts that i made during that time but also in the scraps and notes that i promised i would eventually get to but every time i thought about it, i came to the realization that i didn’t want to be anywhere around them. I didn’t want to have to acknowledge how i utterly abandoned common sense, integrity and how i’d used coping strategy after coping strategy of trying to maintain a relationship (with plans of marriage) to someone that… that frankly, i loved but was not physically attracted to in the least.  To be sure, she was beautiful and was capable of putting an act on that was so convincing that it even fooled her- but one thing i’ve learned over the last few years is that it’s when times are tough and you’re given a choice between doing what’s easy over what’s right or doing what’s right over what’s easy that the content of your character is revealed.

And therein lies the segue.

I made a promise to myself that i’d get all of this fucking detritus out. Some of that is taking responsibility for, and openly admitting all of the coping strategies i’d used to maintain a belief system, and by extension, a relationship, that was so fucked up and convoluted that when that belief structure collapsed and all of the sutures and stitches i’d used to maintain my beliefs and relationship came apart, it cost me my job, my dignity, my self respect and for a while, i lost my sanity.

I’ve decided that i’m going to clean house, so to speak. That backlog of hurt, rage and honesty that i’ve been avoiding for years because it seems so irrelevant now- i’m going to make an entry and bit by bit, get all of that shit out. I’m not going to do it in one sitting and frankly, it’s not going to make sense. It’ll be disjointed. It’ll be a shattered mirror that i don’t want to touch, let alone look at but that’s exactly what i’m going to do.

I’m glad to say that was years ago. I have my dignity, my self respect and confidence again. I’m living in a part of the world that is beautiful beyond description and am working on some new goals such as another degree (a BS this time of all things) and am about to begin the process of looking for a home. I have a job that is intense and pays decently (terrible benefits though and no paid time off. No vacation, no holiday pay but thankfully WA passed a law forcing employers to provide sick leave) but is sucking the life out of me. It has no future, no chance of advancement but hundreds of people see what I do and know i’m solid. I’m hoping that between those people and the degree i’m pursuing, a better opportunity will come out of it.

On the other hand, it is winter. Winter in the Pacific Northwest. These are the days and nights that it gets tough. Seemingly endless days of drizzle, rain and the winds from the Fraser Valley. Emerald green ferns and mosses set against endless fields of dead and rotting stalks of grass and days when the idea of a horizon seems and the sun on my skin seems like a distant memory from a different land.

There’s more to say and given enough time, it’ll all come out. Unfortunately it’s a Sunday evening and tomorrow is guaranteed to be difficult and draining day for me. Thankfully I now sleep without 120 stoppages of breathing per hour as I did for the better part of 20 years.

I have a profile on OKCupid. It’s… well, it’s free and you get what you pay for.

A few days ago I was playing around on it, using a feature I hadn’t used before. Of course, my ex shows up. There was the pic she used before we met, which had been taken years before and there were at least two that I’d taken of her. To be completely honest, they were really good pictures because I know a thing or two about lighting and composition and because… frankly, because I was able to bring it out in her.

Rewind to the breakup. Seven months after she dropped off my items at a friends house (she was too much of a chickenshit to bring it to where I lived and just leave it at the gate), I finally had the courage to open the box. Among the things that I found was a box with the memory sticks and cards I’d given her. I have a pic of this but can’t find it now. They were filled with pix and images that we’d taken of each other and that we had taken of us. She gave them back- although not quite in the state they were when I’d given them to her. They were each shattered in a fit of rage and left with my stuff to hurt me.

The funny thing is, by the time i found them, my reaction wasn’t one of hurt, it was the first time that i began to pity her and it was when i began to realize that she never loved me nor was capable of love in the first place. I’m going to have to bring that up in another post relatively soon because… well, it’s tough. It’s a cold and hard realization i’ve had to come to.

Back to the topic at hand. Here it is, what? More than three years after she betrayed our friendship and relationship and she is still using the pictures that i took of her on the singles site where we met- pictures that she destroyed on the thumbdrives that i made for her. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

Actually it IS funny, just in a pathetic way.

Speaking of pathetic, but probably not so funny, is how i would eventually find out that the person that became her master had systematically and deliberately taken control and persuasion of her (they entered into a Master/ slave dynamic and didn’t think it was worth sharing with me. I would find out eventually by a picture she posted on another site of her on her knees, his cock in her hand, staring at the camera with this black tar heroin gaze with the caption, “Subspace is my happy place”). I would learn from someone else that he’d disclosed to her that my ex needed to be around others that were, “more enlightened” and “more open minded”. He had deliberately dropped her into subspace, knowing how susceptible submissives are to suggestion and influence when in that state.

I thought about mailing her a copy of that conversation but yaknow, it’s not like she can do any better, so why bother?

When i saw those pictures, taken by me during some of the best days of our relationship and seeing that she’s using them to attract lovers on OKCupid these days, it just made me realize it’s yet another example of just how trashy she is. The one image that looked recent… oh boy. I don’t think there’s anything i could have done even with the best of lighting. She does NOT look good. I can definitely see why she’s using the pix i took of her years ago.

I have never known anyone to be so deeply mired in delusion, self deception and absolute tortured logic. There’s a part inside of her that she has bottled up and tried to forget but she knows that she single handedly destroyed the best thing that had ever happened to her. I think she’s also consumed with shame that she tries to masquerade as being, “sex positive” and “self actualization”. Sorry but no, it turns out that if you tell your partner that you’re going to rut and fuck anyone that you want and if they don’t want to know, they’re not to ask, that’s not love. That’s violence, arrogance, cruelty and just part of being a coward. And somewhere inside of her, she knows that and will do anything to hide it from herself.

The theme i’ve used for years, Stargazer, was updated a few days ago.

It appears that it forced a new appearance and one that, frankly, i’m not very happy with.

In the coming days, as time allows, I’ll find another theme and change things but until then, synaesthetic is going to look kind of rough.

I have found some new templates! Expect the visuals to change here every now and then.

I have only a few minutes left in this day before i have to sleep.

We’re deep in the rain season here in the PNW. It can be a time of absolute splendor; beauty beyond description. But it has its challenges. The sun begins to move toward the western horizon at an alarming rate by 3pm and being deprived of the sunlight can be challenging.
Continue reading “Sundays are still tough”

As of a day or two ago (I don’t remember quite when it happened) marked the three year anniversary of my ex breaking up with me over the phone after four and a half years together. Her last words to me were,

Shelly, I’m oh so smart and there are so many things that I want to do and experiences that I want to have and I just don’t see you have a place in my future anymore.

This is mentioned in another entry that i haven’t posted yet but one of the things that i learned is that when my girlfriend of four and a half years broke up with me over the phone, was too much of a coward to go to a counselor and gave me the, “I’m oh so smart,” speech, then everything ended at that point. She ended our relationship and our friendship at the end of that sentence. Any obligations i had to her were voided, any respect that she was entitled to evaporated in her pusillanimous corona of singularly stupid and shallow solipsism.

Continue reading “Three years on; a journey of insanity, grief and realizations”

There have been so many changes in my life in the last two years that i’m not even going to begin to describe all of them here.

But i can’t seem to describe ANY of them either.

A few months after my breakup, i came into some information that i was previously ignorant of. It was one of those things where it was right in front of me and i guess i chose to not see or acknowledge it. As anyone that knows me will tell you, i am exceptionally and stupidly naive at times. Some people have described it as “charming” and i get that- but there are times when my nativity prevents me from seeing threats- personal threats and threats to my relationships to others. I refused to see others manipulating my relation with my ex, Michelle. I did the same thing with my most recent ex too.
Continue reading “Part one”

It’s been a long time since i’ve written anything. Even now i don’t want to write because sometimes just talking about experiences can cause me to fall back into that experience and undo the healing that i’ve worked so hard to earn. Sometimes just remembering what i’ve been through is like eating a lump of cancer. Very stupid, selfish and insane cancer.

Nonetheless, i’ve always taken pride in that i’d rather live with an uncomfortable truth than live a convenient lie. This is coupled with some information that was given to me a few months ago that just… it just made me numb. I also gave this person my word that i wouldn’t say anything because of the potential to compromise her project for school.
Continue reading “Prelude”